A problem
closely related to excessive use of jargon is excessive use of "adjective-noun
strings"--that is, long strings of words that stack up in an attempt to
modify a single word. These strings are common in science, technology,
industry, and government. But that doesn't make them good professional
style. They may sound impressive (if you allow yourself to be impressed
by that sort of thing), but they are hard to decipher and are therefore
bad style.

Tell the
truth: didn't your brain stick and sputter over that phrase a couple times
before you grasped its meaning? I'd have made your reading task easier
if I'd written:
procedures for evaluating the compensation level of employees

You should
have come up with something like: manual for orienting trainees to the regulations of a military firing
range

The fundamental
technique for unraveling adjective-noun strings is to read them backwards
and break them into smaller modifying units, using prepositional phrases
and sometime entire clauses. However, using this reversal technique doesn't
mean that you always reverse the exact word order represented in
the adjective-noun string, as you'll see in Exercise 1. Still, for many
adjective-noun strings, a straight back-to-front flip (peppered with a
few prepositions and articles) is all that's needed:building radon source location method

We know the
writer is telling us about some kind of method. A method for locating
something. Locating what? The source of something. The source of what?
Radon. What kind of radon? Radon in buildings. So, flipping the adjective-noun
string front to back, we get: method for locating the source of radon in buildings

Much easier
to read, don't you agree?

Another technique
for unraveling adjective-noun strings is to hyphenate chunks in the strings
to show better modification: "Oil bearing shale deposits" becomes "oil-bearing
shale deposits," lest your reader think you mean: "oil that bears shale
deposits." There's a big difference between a man-eating shark and a man
eating shark.

Remember,
the rule is to hyphenate bundles of modifying words when they fall
before the word they modify: "a pea-green boat" versus "a boat
that was pea green."

You may argue
that the first versions in all these examples are shorter than the second;
am I not violating my own principle of "fat trimming"? Shouldn't professional
communications be as brief as possible? Well, yes and no. Certainly, they
should get the job done with as much economy, power, and persuasiveness
as possible. But what IS the job? Saving space on paper or on a computer
screen? No! The job is always to supply the reader's needs, and/or accomplish
your persuasive purpose, while exhausting a minimum of the reader's mental
energy.

True, in
the previous four units I've urged you to use active voice, denominalize,
trim fat, and reduce jargon, all of which tend to reduce sentence length
at the same time they make sentences easier to read and information easier
to assimilate and remember. But with unraveling adjective-noun strings,
the task of making sentences easier to read happens to increase sentence
length a little. Don't worry about that. I repeat: your goal as a communicator
should be to supply the reader's needs, and/or accomplish your persuasive
purpose, while exhausting a minimum of the reader's mental energy.

This is not
a new idea. Over a century ago, Herbert Spencer argued this idea persuasively
in an essay entitled "The Philosophy of Style." In that essay, Spencer
points out that the more energy a reader must expend in wrestling with
the form of a communication, the less energy he has available to expend
upon its content. Conversely, the less mental energy he must expend in
grappling with a communication's form, the more he'll have available to
devote to its content. You definitely want the folks reading your communications
to fall into category "B."

Why do adjective-noun
strings exhaust so much of the reader's mental energy? Precisely because
such strings pack nouns and modifiers together like figs and nuts, without
doing enough to show us the relationship between the parts; consequently,
they leave the reader to do the work of unpacking and sorting.

The other
good reason to break up long adjective-noun strings is that they are often
ambiguous, as we saw in the example of "man eating shark" and "oil bearing
shale."

Let's deal
with the following adjective-noun string in its full sentence context:

New motorcycle
motor durability equipment tests are being performed by engineers.

This could
mean:

Engineers
are using new equipment to test the durability of motorcycle motors,
or:
Engineers are performing new tests on the equipment that makes motorcycle
motors durable,
or:Engineers are performing tests on the equipment that checks the durability
of new motorcycle motors,

--or several
other things. Often, if you are editing (or simply reading) the prose
of another professional who is prone to express himself in adjective-noun
strings, you will have to ask for clarification.

Very well!
Let's see how you do at unraveling the following adjective-noun strings.
As always, type your answer before looking at mine.